"Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" Full review: http://www.beardyfreak.com/rvharpoon.php
Iceland’s first full on exploitation movie invents a scenario where some ex-whalers have taken to murdering tourists instead of taking them on sight-seeing trips.
This loss of income and lifestyle is a nicely Icelandic take on the ‘automated butchery’ that put the family out of business in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”…something obviously intentional.
And for the most part this local take on that idea works very well.
That’s not to say the screenplay does not have some faults, in the first part of the film, with excess flab.
Add the large group of, pretty much all unlikeable at the moment, characters and the first 15 minutes of the film do not herald much hope for the audience, away from a nicely messy axe death.
Thankfully though, once the utterly wasted and dubbed over Gunnar Hansen is injured (in one of the worst above the title name dropping cameos out!), the film starts to come to life as barely a minute has passed, after the group has climbed aboard the killer's boat, before the nicely nasty gore and violence is unleashed.
And, although pretty sparse, this violence and gore is well done and delivers the goods.
People are dispatched by knife, hammer, axe, shotgun and even a ship deck harpoon gun!
Certainly heads more than roll in this sucker.
We also have some nicely gratuitous breast exposure to add to the pile of grimy exploitation goodies on offer.
So as a ‘backwaves psycho family flick’ the film works well and delivers all it should even if there is nothing groundbreaking or surprising here.
But there is more thanks to the unusual screenplay that offers up some sudden surprises as far as characters go (especially the bizarre Endo!) and how the set-up plays out,
The last part of the movie especially becomes completely off-the wall and full of unexpected events, especially when the film splits the action up into various locales at about the 60 minute mark.
As such the final 20 minutes of the film, a film that has been toying with doing
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” at sea, suddenly becomes a delightfully eccentric work full of unexpected twists and weird events and (at last) truly forges its own identity.
And really this is when
“Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre” becomes a very unusual, even unique, work that defies the audience’s expectations.
Overall then a pretty standard, but well made and satisfying, psycho family, horror film that we have all seen countless times before.
But when the screenplay becomes brave enough to do its own thing this well above average horror film becomes something extra special and unexpected and as such gets a whale-sized, hearty, recommendation.